Psychological constructs in foreign policy prediction

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7312932
AutoresAlessio D’amato (0000-0003-2344-0458, Social Science Research Council, autor correspondente), Anthony D’amato (autor correspondente), Anthony A D'Amato (Social Science Research Council, at the University of Michigan)
Ano1967
Volume11
Fascículo3
Páginas294-311
Data de publicação1967-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Conflict Resolution (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0022-0027 • E-ISSN: 1552-8766
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200276701100304
OpenAlexW2099675019
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas31

This paper attempts a pre-factor analysis of a series of possible attitude-clusters (&dquo;con-structs&dquo;) and a suggested framework for linking them that may help in predicting foreign-policy decisional behavior or-what probably amounts to the same thing-in finding regularities in past decision-making behavior.In the literature the paper may be located as a possible middle course be- tween the Scylla of quasi-psychological speculation on &dquo;realism,&dquo; &dquo;power,&dquo; &dquo;moral- ism,&dquo; and &dquo;national self-interest&dquo; of the Morgenthau ( 1960 ) -Osgood (1953) school, and the Charybdis of the complex concern with personality, motivations, aspirations, and goals of the Snyder-Bruck-Sapin school (1962).The relevant difficulty here with the Morgenthau school is not the frequently voiced charge of ambiguity or vagueness, but the fact that the terms used have some substantive &dquo;hard&dquo; content however ill- defined.For instance, Morgenthau and Osgood &dquo;define&dquo; national interest in terms of &dquo;power,&dquo; and state in normative-ambiguous terms that national decision-makers both act to maximize power and ought to act to maximize power.However, the scheme im- mediately runs afoul of another fundamental distinction, that between &dquo;imperialist&dquo; and &dquo;status quo&dquo; nations; the latter apparently have little or no power-lust and ought not to have it (cf.Morgenthau, 1960, pp.68-71).The basic problem is that nations may maxi- mize different things at different times, and one value or goal may eclipse the other.All motives that are defined in terms of specific content are &dquo;impermeable&dquo; (Kelly, 1955) and thus either conflict with (and may be eclipsed by) other content-motives or, if they happen to be universally present, are useless in predicting differentiable interna- tional behavior.The Snyder decision-making school appeared as an extreme reaction to the over- simplification of the Morgenthau school (Wolfers, 1959, p. 90), yet it immediately became entangled in unmanageable com- plexities.By attempting to trace down all the motivational, temperamental, and value- oriented antecedents to a given decision, and despite their avoidance of the immense problems that would have resulted from deeper findings of motivational-content in- consistency and cognitive dissonance, the authors ended with an apparently unreplicable scheme (see Singer, 1961, p. 84).Ad- ditionally, the earlier mistake of specificcontent motives was in fact repeated

Economics · Foreign policy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Law · Political Science Research and Education · Psychology · Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research · Social Psychology